We just finished producing an Empirical Generalisations in Advertising conference for the Wharton Business School SEI Center for Advanced Studies in Management in Philadelphia.
We pulled together a high caliber cast of Advertising research characters from Microsoft, Cisco, OTX Research, The Advertising Research Foundation, MAC Cosmetics, McKinsey, Young & Rubicam, Mars, Duke University, Google, McCann, Turner Broadcasting, Johnson & Johnson, and Bayer, among others.
Everyone who attended the invite only event presented a research paper in front of their peers. Each presentation was followed by lively discussion and, more often than not, debate.
We filmed the two day event with two Panasonic DVX’s and had a roaming Panasonic HVX to film thought leader interviews that we will use to create a single 10 minute documentary from the event.
Each conference session will be released online shortly as a stand-alone video for the benefit of professionals in the advertising research industry.
Knowing that we would have two days worth of video multiplied by two cameras, my head hurt at the thought of transferring 20+ MiniDV tapes, one by one, before we could start editing.
Fortunately, we brought along two external hard disk video recorders. The first camera was attached to a Datavideo DN-300. The second camera to a Datavideo DN-400M. The cameras sent both audio and video through a single six pin to four pin firewire cable.
The beauty was that as soon as we returned to our NYC studio we could pull all the footage from the two Datavideo drives and start editing immediately. The alternative would have been a mind numbing 30 tape transfers, all in real time.
Joe is now happily editing away and reliving his favorite Empirical Generalisation moments.
God bless external hard disk video recorders – a Christmas stocking stuffer for anybody who shoots video for a living.
